Galego | English

Fiction

O exiliado e a primavera

By Manuel Veiga

About this book

Alexandre Marrube, a Galician nationalist who was living in exile in Mexico, comes back to his city after almost forty years of absence to attend the burial of his mother. During those days, he finds a community that does not show any interest in politics, that has forgotten the war and the famine and that is not at all aware of the fact that they are living in a dictatorship. Marrube also has to face a family he hardly knows too (his sister and his brother-in-law, the judge, who survived in Galicia), and a young man who is against Franco and who adheres to a political discourse that Marrube finds difficult to understand Alexandre Marrube comes back to Galicia to find or reconstruct his lost world, but with growing desperation he finds that this quest is futile. He is confronted with an utterly apathetic society that has lost its memory, a society he cannot understand, a society satisfied with the new and precarious consumerism.

O exiliado e a primavera by Manuel Veiga was awarded the Premio Xerais 2004 and is a vigorous and evocative novel written in a powerful style and the capacity to evoke, a novel to foster debate in different lines and for a wide audience.

Book fragment

That last winter the mountains that surround the wide interior valley of Lemos and those that can be seen with clarity afar were always covered with snow. Even the small bean of Piñeira that looks like an ant hill and that is located at one of the edges of the city had to take its brunt too. In no case did the men -- those dark men with lush beards and cruel humour that abound there -- get rid of their black and ochre coats; nor did the women -- loud spoken and big-chested -- get rid of their black and ochre coats. The boys who were not residential students at the Fathers Escolapios used to have a smoke on their way from home to school just to warm their fingers and the girls who were studying at the Divina Pastora used gloves for hands and legs made of thick grey wool. Spring also brought its own white with it, the flowers on the apple tree. Observers, or those who died or ran away during the events of 1936, must have wondered why the atmosphere in the city was still thick and proud, as if the walls were still standing and the tollhouses were still active. With constant and open disdain, M. pretended he was not jealous of the provincial capital, forgetting that he came from a family of farmers who had turned to trade, to growing industry, and that had taken on a vain and Spanish-ridden speech typical of a frontier.